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KING: What else, Governor Romney? You've been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that's even better.
Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut -- we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we're doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we're doing that we don't have to do? And those things we've got to stop doing, because we're borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we're taking in. We cannot...
KING: Including disaster relief, though?
ROMNEY: We cannot -- e cannot afford to do twhose things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all.
As of this writing Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on an estimated 60 million people. Among those 60 million are millions who live along vulnerable coastline or "inland" in name alone. No matter what path the storm takes, it is certain that vast numbers of people will soon find their homes flooded, their electrical power interrupted, their food rotting, their water shut off, their means of transportation severely impaired if not altogether eliminated. They will have no recourse but to rely on their federal, state, or local government to stay alive.
This happens every year, and will continue to happen every year.
When Hurricane Isaac menaced Tampa, Florida just a few months ago, the Republican Party collectively held its breath because, as Americans were made painfully aware in 2005, Hurricanes and Republicans simply don't mix. It was pointed out in these pages that Paul Ryan, who would bear the standard of the Party this year, had publically opposed the creation of fund for emergency preparedness which would speed up the process of getting desperately needed relief to people whose lives were upended by natural disasters.
As Hurricane Isaac bears down on the Gulf Coast, there should be plenty of money – some $1.5 billion – in federal disaster aid coffers, thanks, in part, to a new system that budgets help for victims of hurricanes, tornadoes and floods before they occur.
It's a system that Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee-to-be for vice president, had hoped to scrap as a way to make his House GOP budget look smaller by about $10 billion a year.
Ryan was one of 66 House members, all Republicans, to vote against the measure, which passed anyway and as a consequence will factor into the assistance of those harmed by Sandy.
The Ryan budget, which the Republican House would present to a "President Romney," doesn't mention FEMA. In fact in keeping with its deliberate opacity it doesn't mention much of anything likely to spark focused public opposition.
But under a Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan administration, FEMA's ability to respond quickly and effectively to natural disasters could be severely inhibited. In a 2012 report on Rep. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" roadmap (which Romney has said is similar to his own), the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that, due to the severe cuts to non-entitlement, non-defense spending, the costs for things like emergency management would have to be passed on to the states—which, with just a few exceptions, are currently in an even tighter financial bind than Washington.
This is the point where the utter bankruptcy of the Tea Party and its love child, Paul Ryan's, philosophy becomes self-evident. Where exactly would Chris Christie, for example, find the tens of millions of dollars which will likely be necessary to repair the New Jersey Coastline after this disaster sweeps through? The harsh reality is that natural disasters tend to tear the curtain away from the fantastical imaginings of these ideological opportunists.
We saw the same philosophy in 2005 when Bush dumped FEMA's operations on an incompetent Michael Brown, whose claim to fame was as a Judge of the International Arabian Horse Association. It's a deliberate lack of concern for the necessary functions of government. But even Bush wasn't reckless enough to tout it as official policy.
But Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the controlling regime in the House of Representatives have already admitted what they really want is for every disaster to provide an excuse to make further cuts in domestic programs.
What Ryan proposes is that when disaster strikes, lawmakers scour the rest of the budget for savings to pay for rebuilding homes, roads and schools and helping small businesses. Put another way, instead of being an excuse to increase spending, disasters would offer an opportunity to make further cuts elsewhere in the government
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It's hard to overstate the venality that guides such thinking. Using a catastrophe as an excuse to rip out the last vestiges of protection for the citizens in this country reveals nothing less than a crass malevolence that has no relationship to the responsibilities of governing a nation. Couching such a philosophy in terms of "morality," as Romney did in the June 13 2011 debate above, shows a complete lack of understanding of the meaning of the word. But more importantly, it reveals both of the Republican candidates to be devoid of any sense of reality.
Well, reality is now heading directly towards 800 miles of the East Coast. And Americans are preparing to deal with it, with absolutely no thanks to the likes of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
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